Java > Scala

[Russel Winder]

On Tue, 2011-12-20 at 23:13 -0800, Isaac Gouy wrote:
> > From: Russel Winder <russel at russel.org.uk>
[...]
> > Actually I am surprised that Java does so well in this comparison due 
> > to its start-up time issues.
> 
> Perhaps the start-up time issues are less than you suppose.

Very possibly the case, I have only switched to Java 7 recently and
haven't had time to assess start up or JIT kick in times.  Great strides
in startup time have been made with each release of Java, at least on
Linux, using mmap and preloaded runtime  infrastructure.

> The Help page shows 4 different measurement approaches for the Java
> program, and for these tiny tiny programs, with these workloads, the
> "excluding start-up" "Warmed" times really aren't much different from
> the usual times that include all the start-up costs -
> 
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#java

My experience is similar, that JIT warmup is only a small effect when
using int and yet quite dramatic when using long.  This is to be
expected though because a long is not an atomic type in the JVM but is
two ints.

[...]
> Your "Groovy rewrite effort" didn't contribute a single program in 6 months !

In the interim Groovy had been ejected so there was no point.  No real
need, and probably highly inappropriate to rehearse all the arguments
here.  It's water under the bridge.  There is no no enthusiasm for
getting back into the shootout since Groovy  is not a language for
computationally intensive code, that is the realm of D, C, C++, Fortran,
and sometimes Haskell.  If we want to progress this point we should do
so on the Groovy lists, or privately, rather than here.

> > There is no point in a language development team running a benchmark. 
> 
> 
> Tell that to the PyPy developers http://speed.pypy.org/

That is only a comparison of PyPy against CPython using the CPython
benchmarks.  Those are internal Python benchmarks.  So yes very
reasonable.

> 
> Tell that to Mike Pall http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html

An internal comparison of Lua engines.  Entirely reasonable.

> Tell that to the Go developers

Do you have a particular URL in mind?

My point though was that (and this is where Walter received so much
flak) where a language vendor tries to do comparisons with other
languages there are always claims of bias whether true or not.   In this
sense the Alioth Shootout has the benefit of being clearly independent
of any language vendor.  The examples above are not at all inconsistent
with my point.
  
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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